r, he scrambled on
board. The same instant the men gave way. They pulled carefully through
the narrow jaws of the little harbor, and away, with quivering oar and
falling tide, went the boat, gliding out into the measureless North, where
the horizon was now dotted with the sails that had preceded it.

No sooner were they afloat than a kind of enchantment enwrapped and
possessed the soul of Clementina. Everything seemed all at once changed
utterly. The very ends of the harbor-piers might have stood in the _Divina
Commedia_ instead of the Moray Frith. Oh that wonderful look everything
wears when beheld from the other side! Wonderful surely will this world
appear--strangely _more_--when, become children again by being gathered to
our fathers, joyous day! we turn and gaze back upon it from the other
side! I imagine that to him who has overcome it the world, in very virtue
of his victory, will show itself the lovely and pure thing it was created,
for he will see through the cloudy envelope of his battle to the living
kernel below. The cliffs, the rocks, the sands, the dune, the town, the
very clouds that hung over the hill above Lossie House, were in strange
fashion transfigured. To think of people sitting behind those windows
while the splendor and freedom of space with all its divine shows invited
them, lay bare and empty to them! Out and still out they rowed and drifted
till the coast began to open up beyond the headlands on either side. There
a light breeze was waiting them. Up then went three short masts, and three
dark-brown sails shone red in the sun, and Malcolm came aft, over the
great heap of brown nets, crept with apology across the poop, and got down
into a little well behind, there to sit and steer the boat; for now,
obedient to the wind in its sails, it went frolicking over the sea.

The Bonnie Annie bore a picked crew, for Peter's boat was to him a sort of
church, in which he would not, with his will, carry any Jonah fleeing from
the will of the Lord of the sea. And that boat's crew did not look the
less merrily out of their blue eyes, or carry themselves less manfully in
danger, that they believed a Lord of the earth and the sea and the
fountains of water cared for His children, and would have them honest and
fearless.

And now came a scattering of rubies and topazes over the slow waves as the
sun reached the edge of the horizon and shone with a glory of blinding red
along the heaving level of green, dashed w